


Blood and Tissue (waiting for the pain to stop)

by cocoacremeandgays



Category: South Park
Genre: Aged-Up Characters, Angst, Blood, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Graphic, Grief, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort-ish, M/M, Menstruation, Miscarriage, Teen Pregnancy, Trans Male Character, unknown pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 21:58:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20646314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cocoacremeandgays/pseuds/cocoacremeandgays
Summary: “Period cramps,” Kyle says. Stan makes a face like he doesn’t believe Kyle.A shorter amount of time, if that’s even possible, and Kyle is basically doubled over again.When this wave passes a few minutes later, Stan looks Kyle right in the eyes and firmly says, “That isn’t normal.”((AKA: In which Kyle has a miscarriage.))





	Blood and Tissue (waiting for the pain to stop)

**Author's Note:**

> i'm kind of hesitant to post this because of the subject matter.  
there's descriptions of periods and miscarriages. it's not as explicit as i could have made it, but it's definitely still graphic. please mind the tags, and please read with caution.

The pressure started early this morning, just before first hour. At that point, Kyle knew what was coming. He’d been due a period for three months and he’d been moody and ill recently— not to mention the mild spotting these past two days. He wasn’t excited about the fact that his period had started at _school_, of all places, but it couldn’t be helped. He was just grateful that he had pads on him this time around. He always did have a stupid habit of forgetting those hygiene products at home.

Kyle locks himself in a stall and fumbles with the package of a pad. He takes off the liner he’d been working with, and sticks the pad to his underwear, flips the wings under and checks himself with a quick wipe with toilet paper. He’s not bleeding too much right now; it’s mostly just spotting. Brown discharge and all that lovely stuff. He pulls his pants up, washes his hands thoroughly, and heads to his first class.

The pain begins to creep in during the bridge between second and third hour, when Kyle is attempting to walk from one class to another. He manages without issue, knowing that he has dealt with worse in relation to menstrual cramps. This is uncomfortable, not totally agonizing or anything. He’ll get through the day and spoil himself with a nap once he gets home, and that’ll be the end of it.

But then the nausea kicks in. Halfway through fourth hour, Kyle starts up breathing exercises to help himself ignore the near constant ache in his uterus. He doesn’t really know why he feels so ill, but it’s not outside the range of normal. Back when he was in middle school, there was a point in time where he couldn’t eat because it hurt so much. He grinned and bore it, it just hurt a whole fuck ton and it certainly wasn’t pleasant.

After fourth, Kyle makes his way down to lunch and spends most of it in the restroom because he doesn’t have interest in interacting with his friends. He’ll catch up with Stan in next hour French class. He doesn’t have to change his pad yet, which is always a pleasant surprise. Kyle washes his hands even more thoroughly than he had prior and excuses himself to his next class once the bell signaling end of lunch rings. He meets up with Stan halfway to class and they chat idly, asking each other about their days and making jokes about shit that doesn’t matter. They grab their seats near the front of the room and continue talking until class starts.

The ache from earlier turns into a numbing torrent of hurt in what seems to be seconds.

Madame tells the class to stand and follow her in a slew of memorization movements so they can do some French-English word association later on in the lesson, but that’s almost too much for Kyle to bear. He keeps himself upright for a while, but eventually has to grab onto the table so he doesn’t fall, and eventually, he has to full-on lean on the table with both hands because the pain refuses to allow him to straighten. He can’t remember ever having period cramps _this_ bad before, which is strange to him, but he brushes it off as a one-time thing. Maybe there’s something kind of out-of-whack with his hormones this time around, or maybe he pulled something without realizing it in gym the other day. It could be anything.

“Hey,” Stan whispers when Madame is in the middle of showing the next vocabulary word— _micro-ond_. Microwave. Lovely. Kyle doesn’t even try to do the stupid hand-movement of the microwave word-association bullshit, he’s trying not to pass out, here. He’s feeling immensely lightheaded and hot and cold all over. Stan nudges Kyle in the side, and Kyle’s muscles naturally tense, which really does not agree with the pain his body is going through right now. Kyle glances over, almost surprised at just how concerned Stan looks. “You okay?”

Kyle opens his mouth to speak, but he can’t coordinate words as efficiently as he would like. Just when he thought the pain couldn’t possibly get worse, it does. He fights the overwhelming urge to double over or collapse or _something_, and makes the executive decision to shake his head. As much as he hates to admit it, as much as he despises looking weak in front of other people, he cannot possibly focus in the slightest when in this much pain— an amount of pain he has never, ever felt before.

And very suddenly, Kyle recognizes that his legs are two seconds away from giving out completely. He sits down in his chair and rests his head in his hands, trying to breathe through the roughest patch of this particular wave of… goodness, he’d been joking earlier about agony, but that’s the only word that matches up. He wants to curl into himself and hug his lower abdomen, try to apply pressure and massage the area, but he can’t do that. He stays in his seat, very stiff, with his head in his hands and breathes. He waits for the pain to stop. That’s all he can do. “Madame?” Stan asks softly as the rest of the class waits for new instruction. Madame comes over; Kyle can feel her quick-paced walk, and her happy-go-lucky presence.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“I— uh,” Stan cuts off, and Kyle breathes a sigh of relief as the tension low in his abdomen ceases and he is given just a moment without pain. He hopes that’s it. That has to be it, right? Such intense pain can’t last for longer than it already has— and he’s feeling genuine _relief_ now. He sits up slightly, still nauseous but no longer on the very edge of fainting. Kyle finds himself face-to-face with Madame, who is giving him a similar concerned look.

“_Ça va_, Kyle?” she says. “Are you okay?”

“I—” Kyle cuts off, at a loss of what he should say. He gives Stan a glance, this instinctual _help me_ look even though he very much knows Stan has no idea what to do here. He swallows and says, “May I go to the nurse?”

“Oui, yes, I’ll write you a pass,” Madame says. She stands and makes her way over to her desk, and Kyle feels a very distinct rush of _oh, thank goodness_. She quickly returns with the hall pass and gives it to him. Kyle retrieves his stuff as quickly as possible and makes to exit. He’s not surprised when Madame instructs Stan to help Kyle to the nurse’s office; the buddy system is a tried and true method, after all.

Kyle is surprised, however, that the pain comes back in what feels like way too short of a time.

Now out in the empty hallway, Kyle has to catch himself on the wall and pause for a breather. He can’t get a full inhale to fill his lungs, and he feels a very distinct urge to lay on the floor in the fetal position and wait for this to be over. Since he’s alone with Stan and he trusts Stan, Kyle allows himself to grab the wall with his right hand and press his left just below his navel, where the pain is coming from. There’s a mild ache in his lower back as well, but it isn’t nearly as intense. More of the sort of thing he’d get if he’d been sitting with horrible posture all day. Which, given the fact that he’s basically doubled over right now, is probably the basis of his lower back pain.

Period cramps can be fucking atrocious. He hopes this isn’t his new normal.

“Kyle, what’s going on?” Stan asks. Kyle vaguely realizes that this must look extraordinarily concerning to a spectator. Kyle doesn’t respond, though; he can’t. The ache is turning back into the horrible pain, and the horrible pain into unending agony. It hurts so much. There are no words to describe it. His entire body feels affected, and it is affected. He’s lightheaded, he feels feverish, he’s nauseous, and he’s very weak. This… this doesn’t feel normal. Stan places a hand on Kyle’s back, then places the other on Kyle’s shoulder, holding him in support. Kyle appreciates it, but he really doesn’t want to be touched right now. Kyle tries to speak, but it comes out as an embarrassing whimper. “Are you sick?”

Kyle shakes his head. It feels like hours pass before Kyle can actually speak again. With that rolling wave of ice-cold burning gone, Kyle rights himself a bit more and says, “No, I’m on my period.”

“On your period?” Stan asks. “How does that relate—”

“Period cramps,” Kyle says. Stan makes a face like he doesn’t believe Kyle.

“Kyle, I’ve seen my fair share of period cramps, and these look a _lot_ worse than that,” Stan says.

“Yeah, we’ve all fucking seen period cramps,” Kyle snaps, agitated. “Have you experienced them? I’ll gladly rip out your bladder if you’d like to compare pain.”

“Whoa, uh, no, thanks, I—” A shorter amount of time, if that’s even possible, and Kyle is basically doubled over again. He tries to press, to massage the area, but that just makes it worse. Suddenly overwhelmed by weakness, Kyle reaches out with the hand not grasping the wall for dear life and latches onto Stan’s shirt. Stan guides the two of them down to the floor. When this wave passes a few minutes later, Stan looks Kyle right in the eyes and firmly says, “That isn’t normal.”

Kyle’s starting to believe him.

Kyle nods.

Stan’s grip tightens on Kyle’s arms, and he slowly stands the two of them back up. It takes all of the energy in Kyle’s being to manage what feels like such a feat, but the important thing is that he does, in fact, _manage_. Sure, he grabs onto Stan as they walk, and they have to stop every once in a while so Kyle can focus all his energy on breathing the pain away, but he _manages_.

The nurse’s office is, predictably, dark and “soothing”— though Kyle never thought of it that way. Lowered lights in the front portion of the office is supposed to be helpful for those dealing with headaches or other such distracting ailments, but it just distresses him and makes him feel like he can’t see properly. Though, now that he thinks about it, that might just be the pain he’s _managing_ right now.

As soon as they pass the threshold of the door, Kyle’s knees buckle and he has to grab onto one of the waiting chairs. He tries to keep himself upright— and from what he can feel of Stan’s grip, Stan is trying to help in that endeavor—, and he manages just long enough to sit in the very chair he’d grabbed on to.

“What’s going on?” the nurse asks. Kyle wants to answer, but Stan gets to it before he can even open his mouth.

“He’s in a lot of pain,” Stan says. “I don’t know, he says they’re period cramps, but this seems a little excessive for period cramps.”

Kyle glares at Stan, who pales.

“I— that didn’t come out right, I meant—”

“It’s okay, we understand,” the nurse replies. “Kyle, would you like me to call one of your parents to come pick you up?”

That sounds so childish, and of course, Kyle’s first instinct is to say _no, of course not, just let me ride this out until school lets out_, but he doesn’t say that. He just feels sick. He has had some bad periods before, but none like _this_— and he doesn’t really want to be at school to find out what might come next. So he says, “Yeah, please.”

“Mother or father?”

“Mother.”

Mom is more understanding about this crap. Probably because she actually deals with this shit.

Kyle can hear the nurse type something on her computer, and he can hear her pick up the phone and dial the number she just looked up.

Stan sits in the chair to Kyle’s immediate right. He hasn’t let go of Kyle once, whether it be supporting him through another obvious wave of cramping or rubbing his back in the moments of respite. At one point, Kyle thinks he might vomit. He presses a hand to his mouth without thinking about it.

“Are you feeling nauseous?” the nurse asks. The other nurse and one of the assistants has shown up. He doesn’t know when they appeared, but he’s being watched by four different people now, and he only really trusts one of them. It’s freaking him out— and it’s _embarrassing_.

“A little,” he mumbles. The first nurse hums with the information. It goes silent, and they’re back to waiting. Stan is still rubbing his back, the heart of his palm massaging little circles between his shoulder blades. It’s soothing, and it helps. He wants to tell him he appreciates the gesture, but he gets that familiar ache low in his abdomen and knows he’ll be unable to speak for a while.

The pain curls him over. He crosses his arms against his stomach and leans forward, forehead almost touching his knees. He waits for the pain to stop.

Stan rubs his shoulders, like he knows the rest of his body is too sensitive and overworked to be touched. It’s really kind of amazing, actually, how intuitive Stan can be.

A few minutes later, the wave of pain eases, and Kyle’s left breathing. He sits back up slowly. He’s afraid of fast movements, terrified they’ll trigger another wave of cramping.

“Where’s the pain?” The first nurse keeps asking him questions. He glances up, and isn’t pleased at the fact that they’re all still staring at him, like he’s some fucking circus freak.

Unsure of how to describe where the pain is, Kyle sits up enough to gesture to where he _thinks_ the ache might be coming from. That’s the thing about uterine cramps— you can’t always pinpoint them. They just are there, and they hurt.

“So, normal place? Okay,” the nurse says, and she speaks so quickly after he starts to gesture that it’s like she didn’t want him to actually answer. It’s strange, and it pisses him off to imagine such a thing, but he ultimately tries to brush it off. He has bigger fish to fry right now. “Do you get bad periods often?”

“No,” he says. “No, never like this.”

They seem concerned at this, though that might just be the fact that he’s leaning forward in pain again. He closes his eyes tight. He doesn’t know if he’s trying to will the pain away or if he’s trying to ignore it; he doesn’t know if he’s concerned or just wants it to be over.

“Poor kid,” the second nurse says, low in tone like Kyle won’t be able to hear her, even though she’s literally not even five feet away. It’s a small fucking office. Kyle grits his teeth and bites back the odd, cold-hot-tingling sensation in his body. He thinks he feels lightheaded.

“It’s going to be okay,” Stan says, his own voice low, like the nurses and shit won’t be able to hear him. The irony is enough to help Kyle cheer up a bit.

He doesn’t know if it’s because of lack of oxygen, or lack of blood flow, but Kyle’s hands go numb and his fingers curl. It’s weird, and he has no fucking idea why that’s happening. He clenches and unclenches his hands the best he can, trying to keep them from doing that weird… claw thing.

“Don’t worry about that,” one of the nurses says— he’s so disoriented, at this point, that he doesn’t know which one says it. He keeps his eyes closed. She adds, “Just focus on taking nice, deep breaths.”

So he does. He breathes. Stan rubs Kyle’s back, and Kyle breathes, and whispers a soft expletive at each coming wave of cramps— fights back whimpers and succeeds only half the time.

When his mom shows up, Kyle doesn’t really have the mental fortitude to comprehend the expressions of the people around him. He knows that he’s confused, because they bring out a wheelchair, and one of the nurses approaches him. He stares at the wheelchair like it’s personally offensive to him, which, in many ways, it is.

“What’s that for?” he mumbles.

“For us to take you to the car,” says the nurse. The second nurse and the assistant have finally gone back to their regularly-scheduled program of Fuck All, TM— it’s just nurse one, Stan, Kyle, and Kyle’s mom. Even so, he doesn’t like the fact that they think he needs a wheelchair.

“I don’t need a wheelchair, I can walk,” he says. The nurse shakes her head.

“No, you can’t, you’re weak,” she says. Kyle takes offense to that.

He doesn’t really know how he gets into the wheelchair. He’s tired, and his eyes keep falling shut. He almost dozes off a couple of times in the short walk from the nurse’s office, down the hallway, to the doors. They stop there, and he takes that as a green light to stand up. Someone grabs him and helps him sit back down. On second glance, he realizes it’s Stan.

“Don’t stand up yet,” Stan says. “We’re getting you to the car.”

Kyle can only say, “Oh.”

They open the doors and push him out into the parking lot. Riding in a wheelchair is so bumpy, it aggravates his nausea. He tries to stand up on his own again once he gets to the car. The nurse freaks out, which leads Stan to get that panicked look on his face and sit Kyle back down again. Kyle’s first instinct is to make sure Stan’s okay, but he doesn’t get the opportunity to ask him that question.

The nurse places her hands under his arms, stands him up, turns him around, guides him to the car, and aids him in sitting sideways in the car’s passenger seat. It’s embarrassing.

This is all so fucking embarrassing. They’re treating him like he’s dying. He’s not dying, nothing is dying, no one here is dying, it’s not that big of a deal. He just needs to take some freaking motrin and pass the fuck out for a good six hours or so. Ride the worst of it out without being conscious for it.

Mom gets into the car and buckles herself in. Kyle supposes he should do the same; his hands still feel numb, but he can move his fingers without issue. He pushes the mechanism together and collapses back into the seat. He’s really drained.

“I’m going to bring you to the hospital, okay, bubbeh?” his mom says. Kyle shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “Don’t need to.”

“We might not need to, but I’d like to be sure,” she replies. She starts up the car. “This amount of pain isn’t normal.”

As they’re driving out of the parking lot, Kyle notices Stan is watching them leave.

Much to Kyle’s chagrin, they go to the ER. Mom instructs him to wait in the car, which he does without question. He dozes for a moment, only for his mom to come back a few minutes later with a nurse toting yet another damned wheelchair.

When they help him out of the car, he protests. He tells them he doesn’t need it, that he can walk on his own, but he must not be very convincing. The nurse tells him it’s _better to be safe than sorry_ and he has this overwhelming urge to punch her. He likes to think that, if it weren’t for the distracting cramps, he would have.

They wheel him in. And there’s paperwork to be seen. And then there’s waiting. A lot of waiting. A solid two hours of waiting.

In those two hours, Kyle realizes a few things. He naps, first of all, and when he’s conscious again, he recognizes that he has definitely begun to bleed heavily. Not enough to leak through the pad, but it adds yet another level to his discomfort.

Then they meet with the nurse, who brings him back and helps him into a bed and does some extra paperwork and questions. She asks what’s happening, how long it’s been happening, if this has happened before.

If he’s _sexually active_.

Kyle says no, at first, of course he says no. But then the nurse closes off the curtain and gives him this look. It’d piss him off, ordinarily— but this isn’t a very _ordinary circumstance_.

He admits he had sex a few months ago and leaves it at that.

She marks something off on her little clipboard and after a second, she looks up at him with these eyes that read depth and asks, “Is there any chance you could be pregnant?”

* * *

  
The rest had been a bit of a blur. There was an ultrasound, and there were other tests, and there were more questions— questions he can’t answer and questions he can’t, for the life of him, remember. He finds himself admitted, bleeding even more heavily, still in pain, with a word swirling around his head like a tidal wave knocked it loose from the dictionary:

_Miscarriage_.

At some point, Kyle curls up on his side in the hospital bed and tries to ignore the world. His mom hasn’t left his side since they got here, but ever since that nurse asked the question _is there any chance you could be pregnant?_ and that physician’s assistant said the word _miscarriage_, he might as well have been alone.

Stan comes in to visit later that night. Kyle’s Dad comes in at the same time. In that dull hospital room, with the cream walls and only a small amount of light above the bed, Stan visits and Kyle’s parents leave to talk and it is so, so _loud_, he just wants everything to stop making so much _noise_, and he can’t even comprehend—

“Hey,” Stan mutters, pulling up a chair and brushing Kyle’s hair out of his face. It’s a gesture Kyle doesn’t want. He doesn’t want to be touched, and he doesn’t want to be spoken to. “Are you okay?”

“I’m having a miscarriage,” Kyle replies. It is not past-tense. It is not over. He is having a miscarriage. _Having_.

He guesses he had to tell Stan sometime, and now felt like the best option. But now it’s out in the open, now it’s real and now it’s true and Kyle’s eyes burn with the knowledge of it.

Stan looks shocked. Pale.

“You’re... you were pregnant?” Stan asks.

And the dam breaks loose.

“I’m sorry,” Kyle sobs. Tears start to stream down his cheeks. Before he knows it, the pillow he lays on has a large wet spot on it. “I killed it, oh, God, I killed our baby.”

“It isn’t your fault,” Stan says. Stan hushes Kyle and pets Kyle’s hair and kisses Kyle’s cheek and forehead.

Kyle hates it. He hates the fact that Stan is probably tasting tears right now, hates the fact that Stan doesn’t care, that Stan endures it for Kyle.

Kyle hates the fact that he draws comfort from the touches and kisses and hates _himself_ because he knows he doesn’t deserve it.

“It didn’t do anything,” Kyle says, unable to keep the thoughts locked away in his head. If he keeps them inside, he’s going to explode. He hiccups breaths through his words. “It didn’t do anything, it was innocent, it was— it was just a _baby_ and I killed it, I didn’t even— I didn’t even know it was _there_, how could I not know I was _pregnant_—”

“Shhh,” Stan whispers. “It isn’t your fault, you didn’t know, you didn’t know.”

“I could ha-have—”

“No, _no_, you didn’t know.” Stan cradles Kyle’s head, smooths his thumbs over Kyle’s cheeks. Another kiss to Kyle’s forehead. “It isn’t your fault, okay? It isn’t your fault.”

Kyle feels like he can’t breathe, like the weight of the world is collapsing on his shoulders in this big, impenetrable hunk of char.

“We’re barely eighteen,” Stan eventually says. He is quiet as he speaks. “We’re not ready for kids.”

“That doesn’t mean I wanted it to _die—_”

“Okay,” Stan says. “Okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, Ky. Can you scoot back a bit for me?”

Kyle weakly acquiesces. Stan awkwardly climbs into bed next to Kyle. And holds him.

Stan wraps Kyle up in his arms and smooths back Kyle’s hair and pets Kyle’s skin and rubs Kyle’s back.

And the weight of the world reduces itself to ash that buries Kyle, that suffocates him. It takes the shape of guilt from what he’s done and not done. It curls into the terror of grief from a person he hadn’t known existed. The thoughts of having done something unforgivable, despicable, remain.

Kyle presses his face into Stan’s chest.

He waits for the pain to stop.

**Author's Note:**

> this might become multichaptered if i decide to expand on it. 
> 
> feel free to let me know your thoughts.
> 
> comments / feedback / constructive criticism; all is welcome
> 
> <3


End file.
